‘Ruptures and Continuities’ shows the MFAH at its best

The FotoFest 2010 Biennial‘s principal exhibitions wrapped up last week, but many of the more than 100 affiliated shows are still on view. The strongest by far is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which put its best foot forward with the third in an ongoing series examining how parts of its collection might be permanently displayed when the MFAH eventually gets a third building.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Zhang Huan, Family Tree, 2001.

Organized by Yasufumi Nakamori, the museum’s assistant curator of photography, Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made After 1960 From the MFAH Collection, has done a lot of heavy lifting during the past couple months. It’s reminded visitors from the international photo community why the MFAH remains a leader in the field. It’s given museum patrons ample evidence of what audiences are missing because of the current shortage of permanent galleries for one of the best parts of the MFAH’s collection. It’s offered valuable historical and international context for the official FotoFest exhibits, which focused on contemporary U.S. photography.

And it’s shown viewers how inextricably tangled the recent histories of photography and the past 50 years’ leading art movements are. Conceptualism, performance art, land art, body art, sculpture — they’ve all changed and been changed by photography for good. The show even offers a window into the convulsions painting, that most traditional of media, underwent during the radicalism of the 1960s, presenting photos documenting Günter Brus’ 1964 Self-painting performance — a hallmark of the taboo-flouting Viennese Actionism movement.

Courtesy Archivio F. Conz, Verona

Günter Brus, detail of Selbstbemalung (Self-painting), 1964.

It’s not too far-fetched to see Ruptures and Continuities as a crash course in recent art history, viewed through a camera’s lens.

Except in the case of works made without a lens, like Susan Derges’ mural-size Shoreline, May 18, 1988. Derges created it by immersing photographic paper in sea water along a shore, illuminating parts of the print with a flash. It gives you the feeling of being engulfed in the sea, and it’s drop-dead gorgeous.

Not everything here is, nor is it meant to be. For many artists, who often didn’t even consider themselves photographers, the desire to make beautiful pictures had nothing to do with why they picked up a camera, which they used as a tool for experimentation or documentation. It helps to view their photos as artifacts of ideas rather than aesthetic objects, and to spend time with the show’s excellent wall texts, which shed light on what those ideas were.

Nakamori has installed most of the idea-based photographs in the show’s introductory section. Traditionalists may find it grueling, especially since it segues into a section called Self-Performance, which could also be dubbed Artists Gone Wild, what with all the gender-bending, convention-defying ways artists like Ilene Segalove and Morimura Yasumasa are shown using their bodies as artistic media. These areas are where most of the show’s “ruptures” are concentrated, and they might leave some viewers feeling a bit shell-shocked.

But the “continuities” take center stage in the exhibition’s spectacular Transformation of the City and New Landscape sections, which make clear that artists continue to find new ways to use photography to do what it’s done since the 19th century: record environmental, architectural, social and cultural change, along with the effects of war. The MFAH’s concentrations of photographs by William Eggleston and Richard Misrach come in handy here, as Lewis Baltz’s seminal 1974 series The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California.

The way Baltz’s photos connect minimalist aesthetics with the pre-fabricated environments that were transforming urban and suburban landscapes is reinforced by how they’re hung: in a modernist grid that’s thrown slightly off-kilter by the fact there are 51 rather than 50 works in the series. Baltz meant for them to be seen all together, and they are for the first time at the MFAH.

Of course, the MFAH wouldn’t have this kind of photographic bounty without Anne Wilkes Tucker, the museum’s Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, who has made the collection what it is. Kudos to her for giving Nakamori such a well-stocked treasure chest to raid, and kudos to him for making the most of it.